“It’s not that I don’t believe your surgery can patch me up, doctor. In the days to come, I might not get the chance again. You see, I stood up to the Devil herself. No armies have managed to hold her in. The best of Modern security has failed to keep her out. She will come for me. It’s only a matter of time.
They say that the just shall live by faith. Please, Mr. President, let me die with mine. When she comes for me, I will stand up to her one more time. No matter the consequences, I’m not going to lay down. She will come for me and I’ll fight just like my father, Agent Rally Lewis, taught me to. I will die a shocking death, no doubt with the whole world watching. When that day comes, Mr. President, I want you to remember what happened today. I want you to remember what I said to you when the World as we knew it came to an end. Listen here! You’re not going to beat this demon-woman with armies, strategies, or any of the systems of modern tactical warfare. It will be people. People working together for the sanctity of life. This war can’t be fought with soldiers, Mr. President. It will be healers that save this fight. This is my last request, President Matthews. Cherish the sanctity of life. Foster the better angels… of our nature…”
The effort to speak had turned Jane’s lips blue. She reached out and grabbed the President’s forearm.
A military chaplain was ushered into the room. Jane’s eyes fluttered. President Matthews looked into her eyes, feeling the same awestruck wonder one feels when they look into the eyes of a dying tiger.
They understood each other. In the years to come, that understanding would give them both the strength they’d need to face their demons together.
*****
Epilogue
The world outside had experienced a single week since the Shreveport catastrophe. For Lucien Kingsley, it felt eons. He wasn’t cut from the same cloth he’d made his bed out of. Lucien was soft. Pure French vanilla on the inside. A single week in solitary confinement at the Guantanamo Bay Detention camp and he’d lost his marbles.
He stared at the four walls of a cell closed in by sand bags. His guards were playing poker for cigars and beer. They were laughing riotously and reminiscing about the history of their time on the Bay.
Kingsley remembered faintly what freedom had been like. The smell of spilled mescal wafted to his nostrils from the dim light of “Outside”. He watched the ceiling swirl for the thousandth time that he’d laid back on his straw mat and looked at it.
One magic night on Benton Road rolled through his mind on replay like the scenes of a chick-flick. He remembered the exotic sparkle in her eyes. Every curve of her body.
He fought it at first. Passed it off as psychosis. She had been the scourge of the Modern world. If Hitler had known her, she’d have scared him to death. All the wicked that ever walked the earth before she’d lived would tremble in their boots at the power she exuded with just a snap of her fingers. It was debatable whether or not she was even human.
No, not human. The more he kneaded it in the half-baked dough of his deteriorating mind the more he realized she was a goddess. A goddess that had promised him favors and offered him a place at her side.
It wasn’t like he was a saint. Moral obligation didn’t keep him in this jail cell, did it? He wasn’t one to pay penance. He’d only opted for this because he’d been appalled.
Perhaps he’d been wrong about her. She had been pure fire. Her body was more power than money could buy with the lethal way it had moved. He closed his eyes and remembered that night they’d gone sword-to-sword in his Dad’s lab.
Not just any goddess. One of the high seas. Hadn’t Libby said she was more than Calypso could have ever aspired to be?
She was poison. He was a fool if there had ever been one. Left to his own thoughts, cooled from the heat of the moment, he was left to his own twisted proclivities.
It was more than wishful thinking, but maybe if he prayed to his goddess, she would think better of him. Maybe if he won her favor, she would give herself to him. His thoughts were pornographic in the end.
He lay there torturing the data throughout that day and the rest of the night. How could he reach her? He said her name and whispered erotically to the darkness.
The darkness heard him.
Sometime very late in the night, as Kingsley tossed about in the midst of deeply distraught explicit musings, there was a smell like ammonia and bleach mixed together. He sat up on his straw mat, suddenly terrified as he heard his guards choking outside the walls.
His heart beat slowed. Everything grew dangerously quiet.
A voice spoke out of the night.
“So, you want to take the Lady up on her offer?”
He started to feel a slight pulsating under his ribs. He yanked his shirt off in sudden terror and fingered a blue-light that shone out of him.
“You were bugged during your torture session with the Lady just a few days ago. It’s standard procedure for her favorite lambs before she turns them out to my pasture. You wouldn’t have noticed it before, with the chaos and the numbness. It even made it past Hotel security, apparently.” The voice was deep but obviously female.
“You’ve got the control, right? It’s how I feel it when you’re close…” Kingsley felt crazy speaking to the night.
He felt the buzzing again. The woman snickered smugly. There was a sudden caustic burning again. He began to taste pure sugar.
His sandbag igloo cell began to melt like donut glaze. His eyes burned and he jumped out of his skin as droplets from the roof landed on his face and hands sticking and continuing to burn. He screamed and started thrashing as the walls came sinking in.
“Hot sugar. Only the best for you, lover boy.” Her voice bounced off the walls and haunted his soul like a poltergeist.
He felt her spring him and pull him out of the seared and sweet stinging air. He’d gotten so much of the boiling vapor in his mouth and nostrils that he was seriously on the verge of vomiting. Her hand pressed to his lips. The fingers were cold and metallic.
“Shush, shush, baby. I’m not here to hurt you. It’s a business call. Let me buy you dinner.”
He felt something forced between his teeth. His eyes lit up at the sweet/iron taste of blood.
He gagged, throwing up all over himself. The vomit ran down his bright orange jumpsuit, colored with human blood in the moonlight. Her wicked laughter echoed to him from the silence.
That was the problem. His top priority ward was being baked like a deflating donut and there was absolute silence.
“That one’s on the house, Romeo.” Her figure was turned away from him. Around 5’11” and slender with long auburn hair, that much he could tell. Definitely one of Leona’s, but more intimidating than any henchwoman he’d yet encountered.
“Who are you?” He squinted against the darkness. Bodies lay strewn about him, singed in the boiling sugar and sand mixture she’d created to dissolve his prison. They had died long before that having asphyxiated on an ammonia and bleach-based concoction.
“I am Bleach.” She turned to face him and he froze. Her features were statuesque, and eyes were emeralds cut from the heart of the earth. Far more beautiful than Leona ever dreamed of being, and possibly just as dangerous.
She was dressed in a diving suit. He noticed as the light hit them that her palms’ skin had molten gold wrapped around it so thick her fingers were tapered off into stiletto spiked tips.
“I’d say Midas.” Kingsley tossed his head back with a heavy pant. She grinned, revealing that her teeth were capped with conductive metal and sparked with live electricity.
Kingsley should have been terrified of this monstrous woman, who was part angel of death and part James Bond villain, but for some reason he felt utterly calm, even confident, in her presence.
She tossed her head.
“Leona Kelley gave birth to my kind. We’re like a distinct race, a new race, all-powerful. I was a regular person just like you, once upon a time. Then she sank her fangs into me. I’m made of metal and live electrici
ty. Medical research at its best and worst.” She snapped her teeth for emphasis. Sparks flew out of either side of her fire engine red lipstick tinged mouth like a mad dog’s spit.
Kingsley gawked at her for a long moment. She stood there, eyes dancing, letting him look on her in all her glory.
“This is how it’s going to be, Doc. The Lady sent for you. She wanted me to give you the pep talk. You can agree to take her up on her offer and I will thus train you in the ways of my people. Or I’ll kill you in any way that I see fit. Both these things are a win for me. Take your time.”
She leaned against the wall and plucked a human heart from the front of her pea coat. He gaped in horror as she peeled the outward tissue away from it like one might an orange’s rind and began to eat it atrium for atrium like an apple.
“What? I offered you some of it remember. As I recall, you didn’t like the taste. Never mind, it is a delicacy. Like caviar for assassins.” She rolled her eyes and went on gnawing at it.
Kingsley literally felt his knees knocking together. There was a sudden apprehension filling him from head to toe. Just a few days ago he’d utterly loathed Leona Kelley for the things she’d put him through. Yet his whole body was burning with lust for her and he felt like he’d explode if he didn’t have her soon. He knew he couldn’t trust her. No matter how badly he might want her, he couldn’t afford the price.
“Ah, you’ve got the hunger. I can see it in your eyes. Every man she’s ever had is like that in the beginning. Hope you realize that you’ll be the submissive in the relationship.” Bleach shrugged and chewed the heart thoughtfully, blood spurting down her lips.
“Horatio here was just like that only he resisted it with everything he had. She ravaged him brutally. It’s what killed him, so don’t look at me. He didn’t even love her. She straight-up raped him. You’ve seen how strong she is when she’s on her sauce, so you know that it happens. I detest her with every fiber of my being for this and many more crimes against beautiful young men and women I’ve known. Everyone including her knows it. I was so appalled by what she’d done to him, that I ate him. Piece by piece. To digest his pain and maybe redeem him from her clutches with my love. I always save the heart for last. I hope he’s in a better place.”
For all her dark and twisted soul, there was love in her eyes as she told him this story. Kingsley swallowed. He realized that he was walking through the gates of his own private hell and that there would never be any coming back from it. This beautiful, warped, tormented angel of death had come to warn him of his grave peril. She’d gladly have killed him and called it mercy.
“So what will it be, doctor? I strongly advise against taking this poison. I have cyanide with me. Any death I could give you would be so much better. It might teach you the ways of the righteous and save you from perdition. I doubt it, but I could always try. It would be an utter shame for all the world to become as dark and demented as myself.”
She tilted her head, lips quivering with disgust at her own vile nature. Kingsley hesitated.
“You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
She sighed, the weight of the world bearing down on her shoulders.
She plucked a satin handkerchief embroidered with the letter “K” out of her pocket and very carefully wrapped the heart’s leftovers in it, then tucked it back in her pocket again. Easing herself to her feet, she held out a hand. Kingsley stared at it stupidly for a long moment.
“You shake it. To seal a deal. You haven’t been in prison long enough to forget basic social customs, doctor.”
Reluctantly, he shook her hand. She pulled him close to her chest and whispered in his ear.
“Through me, you will learn the way into the City of No Mercy. You’d best abandon all fairytale notions of hope now, doctor.” She pulled away with a soft giggle.
She led him out of the solitary confinement block. Silence had pervaded the entire detention center. It wasn’t rocket science, but Kingsley still played stupid.
“Where are they all?”
“Dead, of course.”
“How did you do it?”
“Follow me. I’ll take you deep into the Amazon. Darien Pass will do nicely. Then I’ll teach you how I did it, along with all the other terrible things I’ve done.”
Kingsley looked back only once as she led him to a Land Rover she’d parked just outside the base. He had the slightest twinge of guilt for all the awful choices that had led him here, but the twinge was gone after a moment. Something told him that he was beyond redemption. The doctor shrugged it off and held his head high against a rising wind, walking to his freedom and into the eye of the perfect storm.
The End (of Book 1)
Continue for Book 2…
THE GOOD DEATH
Book 2:
Andromeda Act
By
Doug McGovern
Prologue
So this is what it feels like to be famous. It was a peculiar type of fame, being a key player in the battle that was leading the world toward the brink of destruction— but it was fame nonetheless. Jane Lewis marveled that other girls had spent their teen years dreaming of stage and screen, of having the eyes of the world on them. She didn’t understand the appeal. Of course, the world’s stage she found herself on now was more like the scaffold of her impending execution, so this was a bit different.
“Ms. Lewis… How can you stand there and say that you are honored to do this? You are a citizen of the United States, risking an unspeakable demise and your government requires that you expose yourself to the very danger that it should be protecting you from.” The reporter was livid, clearly afraid for both their sakes.
Jane reminded herself to breathe. Had she really been just a regular RN at a little clinic in Shreveport a few weeks ago? Now she was standing center stage in a massive football stadium, surrounded by the accusing flashes of photographer’s shuttles, being grilled by sword-tongued reporters.
“The beauty of the Andromeda Act, Mr. Greene, is that I had a choice,” said Jane. “The Constitution grants me every right as a citizen to take up arms in my own and my fellow citizens’ defense, which is what I have done, under legal protections that allow me the material I need for necessary vigilante action, against an enemy that no government can protect me from.” She swallowed, wondering if her words were poorly chosen when the crowd erupted in a flame of searing, panicked chatter.
“If you’re openly admitting that no government can protect you, then what exactly is the purpose of the Andromeda Act? How can citizens back something that its key player seems so certain will fail?” The reporter folded his arms. Jane sighed.
“Mr. Greene, I don’t think you understand, sir. The citizens aren’t being asked to back anything. This is merely an informative press conference. I am an instrument only, a mouthpiece, a decoy to protect the people of these United States and their government from becoming collateral damage to an unprecedented enemy. In that knowledge, Mr. Greene, I am Andromeda. I’m not trying to persuade you to a political view. This is between the President, his administration, and me. This is not a call to action, but a warning to heed the severity of the threat we all face.” Jane clenched and unclenched her hands, keeping her eyes trained to heaven and the blood-red twilight.
“So, what you are saying is that the United States government will use tax dollars to fund a vigilante decoy they handpicked to pose as a prop against an enemy that you say will take whole armies to defeat? Are we just supposed to stand back and accept this? What, Ms. Lewis, gives you more right than any of us to act as a combatant when you have civilian status?” The reporter spat at the ground. Jane closed her eyes. Why could they not understand?
“I don’t have the right, Mr. Greene, to become your scapegoat. If anything, it’s more just like my bad luck. I stood up to this She-Hitler because my city was overrun by armies. I have drawn her undying hatred to myself, and the U.S. government made themselves her target by attempting my deliverance. What you h
ave yet to understand is that there is no sanction that can stop this monster. The duty of the American government is to establish domestic tranquility, not to pat your hands and reassure you that the world is as you’d like it to be when you’re sitting in your plushy offices and classrooms! This is not a motion for yours or anyone else’s opinion, Mr. Greene, no matter how badly that pisses you off! This is your President and your military doing what you’ve only been champing at the bit for them to actually come clean and do since our country’s inception. This is their admission of guilt. This is martial law, with no cover-ups or deceptions.” Jane paused for breath. Like wolves, they pounced on her.
“So, you’re admitting that your actions have ushered in an age of autocratic action on the part of the Federal government?” a reporter screamed from the back.
“What?! How have you gathered that from anything I’ve just said? You all must have crap shoved in your ears and can’t make sense of simple English! I’m saying that your government is taking the insane risks and measures of allowing for temporary actions that go against the order of the Republic in order to protect you from an uprising that would dissolve said Republic. This is a fight that you the people cannot win! This is a beast that kills for kicks until it gets the blood it wants.
“I’m here to alert you that I am the bait and that the Congress is using a fish hook to draw the hounds of Hell away from you, the people! I’m here, this temporary legislation is only here to feed the beast and I’ll be dead no doubt before the end of the week now that I’ve climbed this stage!” She shook her head. This situation was too complicated for even the most seasoned politician.
Before they could draw the breath it would take to grill her again, there was the sound of a chopper dropping low into their airspace. Jane looked up, instantly recognizing one of the people in the cockpit. Her hair stood on end. Was this how it would all end?
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 12
